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Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Novell has unveiled some of the fruits of its technical collaboration with Microsoft in the form of Moonlight 1.0, a Firefox plug-in which will allow Linux users to access Microsoft Silverlight content. Officially created by the Mono project, it is available for all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Also included in Moonlight is the Windows Media pack, with support for Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio and MP3 files."
'[fake-coughing] Moonlight... so deadly... Choking... [laughs] Kidding! When I said "Firefox plug-in," the deadly was in massive sarcasm quotes. I could take a bath in this stuff, put it on cereal, rub it right into my eyes, honestly, it's not deadly at all. To me. You, on the other hand, are going to find its deadliness a lot less funny.
Moonlight is a neat project and Silverlight looks interesting, Flash works. But why can't an open, rich experience, open standards solution for building web sites emerge? Surely that would be better for web site developers and consumers.
Something like this perhaps?
SVG + Video > Silverlight
And that's only the tip of the technological iceberg. Behold the power of HTML5. Coming to every web browser except Internet Explorer.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Which post would that be? The one where Microsoft failed to implement DOM2 events, then implemented HTML5 features based on DOM2 events and therefore incompatible with the standards, therefore not HTML5?
Don't get me started. IE8 is a sore point for me. You WON'T appreciate what you hear. (Or maybe you will. But it won't be the most pleasant conversation.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Don't get me wrong, I think its cool that projects like this exist and I am not going to criticize anyone for spending time working on it.
But Silverlight really seems like a solution in search of a problem. Flash provides nice interactivity at the cost of an annoying plugin, and HTML5 is quickly catching up and should be the long term method of constructing web apps.
The only advantage of Silverlight seems to be the unified language for both backend and content, but that doesn't seem compelling to me. Anyone here using Silverlight for anything interesting that couldn't be done in Flash or HTML?
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
short memory you have there. before MS started working on silver light a decent flash player on linux was but a pipe dream. say what you want about them, but anything MS takes an interest in ends up with savage competition that benefits us all.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Making the web dependent on binary plugin formats....users are probably the only ones who DON'T win.
On the media side, check out:
http://www.smoothhd.com/
I encoded the "Big Buck Bunny" clip up there :). It's still in pre-alpha, but you should be able to get the idea
This uses a new API called MediaStreamSource, which enables file parsers and protocols to be built in managed code, and then hand off the video and audio bitstreams to Silverlight's built int decoders.
In the case of Smooth Streaming, every two seconds of the video is a seperate http request, and each of those chunks is available in six different data rates. Managed code heuristics running inside of Silverlight dynamically pick the right bitrate for the next chunk based on available CPU power, network speed, and window size (no reason to download 720p if the brower window is shrunk down in a corner of the stream).
And because this is based around small http requests, chunks get proxy cached, so 100 people watching the same video behind the same firewall would only need to get a single copy, providing much better scalability than traditional unicast streaming.
Anyway, this is something that Flash certainly can't do, and I haven't seen any hint of HTML5 being able to do. Pulling it all together requires some pretty specific characteristics of the video decoder (the ability to switch resolutions with a new sequence header without any pause), an API like MediaStreamSource, and having a performant enough runtime to be able to run all the heuristics and parsing without using much CPU.
I blogged the authoring workflow for this and some other details here:
http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Expression-Encoder-2-Service-Pack-1-ndash-Intro-and-Multibitrate-Encoding/
My video compression blog
And I don't see anything in Silverlight that isn't similarly addressed by HTML5. Ergo, HTML5 is superior for its standardization, true cross-platform support, and competing implementations that can meet the needs of many different ideals.
For the record, I don't have anything against people such as yourself who work at Microsoft. Many people who work there are great people. But from the inside looking out, you can't see the forest through the trees. You especially can't see the massive amount of harm and disrespect your company is paying the industry. And that harm is why I can't stand Microsoft anymore. Mr. Wilson can complain about negativity all he wants, but he refuses to recognize the trail of broken promises he and your company have given to the industry.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Don't get me started. IE8 is a sore point for me. You WON'T appreciate what you hear. (Or maybe you will. But it won't be the most pleasant conversation.)
Well, if it's something to the effect that though for years, you've absolutely hated Internet Explorer 6's limitations and the fact that Microsoft all but abandoned its development, and during those years, while you put up with all its idiosyncracies you accumulated a metric ton of contempt for the company whose half-life might -- if all the issues were addressed today -- only have you wishing painful chronic illnesses on the IE product development team in 5 years, and that despite all that, you allowed yourself a glimmer of hope when you heard the Microsoft folks talking about how IE 8 would support web standards, only to discover that they're basically still planning on being 4-5 years behind everybody else while dumping a lot of effort into silverlight, but you weren't really surprised because honestly, if they had either the skill or will to keep up, they could have done it without breaking a sweat back when IE6 was actually briefly in the lead, and so your contempt, rather than diminishing, is actually pretty much cemented on a monotonically increasing curve which will eventually cause the cretins involved in IE's product development team to suffer debilitating effects proportional their proximity to you.... then by all means, do go on.
Tweet, tweet.
This is probably due to the Silverlight initialization Javascript which only works on Windows for IE, Firefox, and on OS-X for Safari. Unless the Silverlight initialization Javascript is updated on the webserver which hosts the Silverlight application, which I doubt Microsoft will do, there is almost no way that this will work in Moonlight.